In order to remove some hackishness in `git annex sync --content`, I finally fixed a bad design decision I made back at the very beginning (before I really knew haskell) when I built the command seek code, which had led to a kind of inversion of control. This took most of a night, but it made a lot of code in git-annex clearer, and it makes the command seeking code much more flexible in what it can do. Some of the oldest, and worst code in git-annex was removed in the process. Also, I've been reworking the numcopies configuration, to allow for a [[todo/preferred_content_numcopies_check]]. That will let the assistant, as well as `git annex sync --content` proactively make copies when needed in order to satisfy numcopies. As part of this, `git config annex.numcopies` is deprecated, and there's a new `git annex numcopies N` command that sets the numcopies value that will be used by any clone of a repository. I got the preferred content checking of numcopies working too. However, I am unsure if checking for per-file .gitattributes annex.numcopies settings will make preferred content expressions be, so I have left that out for now. Today's work was sponsored by Josh Taylor.